ABSTRACT
The framing of the 'urban question' shifted over time from a concern with how cities are defined to how the city operates as a site of capital accumulation. This chapter moves from the industrial to post-industrial city, contrasting the patterns of segregation characteristic of the modernising metropolis with those evident today. The city of industrial capitalism was a starkly divided city, its spatial segregations reflecting the growing distinctions of wealth and poverty associated with urbanisation. Rapid urbanisation, when coupled with industrialisation and bureaucratisation, has sometimes been interpreted as signalling the end of community. Urban neoliberalism is a concept regularly deployed in studies documenting the forms of exclusion faced by those who stand in the way of new waves of capital investment. The study of urban segregation is an important tradition in urban studies, encouraging a focus on the different communities that can exist even in one city.
